By Ron Karten
Smoke Signals staff writer

“Extreme Cuisine,” the new Food Network television program featuring Jeff Corwin, is more a hook than a description of the show, the host said during a visit to Grand Ronde on July 30.

“Once we get eyes on the show,” Corwin said, “people will learn about other cultures.”

Filming a program about the Grand Ronde Tribe’s traditional hunt for Pacific lamprey at Willamette Falls, Corwin said in an interview afterward that, despite what the program title suggests, he was not hosting programs “just to shock,” but “to help people reconnect with the sources of their food.”

“I want people to think about where their meals come from,” he said.

In his 14 years hosting a succession of conservation shows, Corwin has found himself between the jaws of an elephant and the fangs of a poisonous coral snake, but he said the worst perils he has faced were manmade.

In that regard, he survived a Maoist rebellion in Nepal and a coup in Cambodia, he said.

“Today, I’m sliding off the rocks on this waterfall, but the bigger danger is swallowing the water” contaminated with chemical runoff, Corwin said.

His professional career has included Animal Planet's “Jeff Corwin Experience,” “Corwin’ Quest,” “Spring Watch” and “King of the Jungle”; Disney’s “Going Wild with Jeff Corwin” Discovery Network’s “Investigation Earth’; NBC’s “Jeff Corwin Unleashed”; and Travel Channel’s “Into Alaska” and “Into the American West.” In 2007, Corwin also co-created and co-hosted CNN’s “Planet in Peril” with Anderson Cooper. In 2008, Animal Planet premiered “The Vanishing Frog,” a powerful documentary highlighting Corwin’s yearlong, global odyssey exploring the mass extinction of the planet's amphibian species.

“It sometimes makes you mad at your species,” he said, “but I’ve always been an optimist.”

This year, his new book will come out. “100 Heartbeats” (Rodale) explores the plight of the planet's most endangered wildlife species and will have a companion television series under the same title.

Meanwhile, “Extreme Cuisine” focuses on foods that are “humanely and sustainably harvested, renewable and culturally significant,” he said.

In Peru, where he recently filmed a show, his indigenous hosts have their choice of 4,000 different varieties of potatoes that they have grown for 8,000 years, he said.

Pacific lamprey, by comparison, can be linked to relatives that go as far back as 450 million years, according to Tribal Natural Resources biologist Rebecca McCoun.

“Imagine,” Corwin said on camera, “an animal so well-designed that it lasts that long without evolving.”

At Willamette Falls, however, where Corwin’s field producer, Ingrid Lantz, scouted location shots the day before, low water flow threatened to leave the crew without a fresh fish for their show.

On the day of the shoot, Tribal member and Natural Resources Manager Michael Wilson and Tribal member Greg Archuleta guided Corwin and his crew as they worked their way along rock faces with a much diminished water flow, but still with patches of wildly rushing water.

Four dead lamprey were among the group’s first finds. Corwin signaled to his crew hundreds of yards across the water that they were large, but … and he drew his finger across his throat.

Soon, Corwin came up with two lamprey, still breathing, still suctioned on the rocks to swing their way up the falls.

Holding a lamprey in his gloved hand, Corwin told the camera about the eel-like fish, the feeling of vertigo he was experiencing and the felt shoes, supplied by the Natural Resources Department, that helped him stay upright on the slippery rocks.

“These rocks are absolutely treacherous,” he told the camera.

“I was worried we weren’t going to get one,” Corwin said later, but many previously caught lamprey were cooling in Natural Resource’s deep freeze back at the Tribe. A lamprey dinner for the show was never in doubt.

The television crew of 13 arrived in two sparkling Chevy Suburbans early in the day, and took off in an old Tribal skiff piloted by Natural Resources staffer Lawrence Schwabe. First filmed were sequences of Corwin leaving the dock, arriving at the falls and returning.

Cameraman Josh Bane shot the crew’s arrival at the falls from the PGE/Westland Paper complex across the river. Cameraman Glenn Evans followed Corwin on the rocks and in the water from closer up. Evans took a pummeling as he held an underwater camera under the falls facing up into the falling water.

“This is the most fun we’ve had on a shoot,” Evans said.

Assistants carried the gear and helped with tricky navigations along the way. Executive producer Tim McOsker watched the shots in a viewing glass that showed just what the cameramen were seeing. He looked for light and framing issues, and listened to Corwin’s narration for effectiveness, and from time to time, he said, “Let’s try to get in closer,” or “take that one again.”

The show could not come at a better time for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The department has embarked on a program of educational outreach to explain the travails of the Pacific lamprey. The department categorizes the lamprey as an “at-risk” species.

While the Pacific lamprey “has been reduced by passage barriers such as dams and road culverts,” according to the department, Wilson and McCoun reported that PGE-installed ramps have helped the lamprey at Willamette Falls.

That may be small comfort for a species that is returning to the rivers to spawn in the lowest numbers ever recorded. At Willamette Falls, commercial harvests fell from an average 218,000 pounds per year from 1943-52 to 13,000 pounds per year from 1969-2001. Counts at Columbia and Snake River dams in the late 1990s were 6 percent of what they had been in the early 1960s.

The Klamath Siskiyou Wildlands Center reports that the Winchester Dam on the North Umpqua River has seen the Pacific lamprey run drop from 46,785 in 1966 to less than 50 annually since 1995.

There remains, however, a “significant lack of information on Pacific lamprey,” McCoun said, and that gap in knowledge is “a direct obstacle to any meaningful assessment or management of the species.”

The reduced lamprey numbers portend more than the potential loss of another species, as unthinkable as that is for the ancient lamprey. For Native Americans throughout the Northwest, these numbers signal the potential end of a long held traditional and cultural practice that has sustained the Native peoples from time immemorial – culturally and nutritionally.

Today, only a handful of Tribal members continue the practice harvesting and preparing lamprey.

Following the day at the falls, Corwin and crew returned to the Tribe’s Natural Resources Department in Grand Ronde where those who continue the practice were busy preparing lamprey and other traditional Northwest fare in traditional ways for a traditional dinner.

Summer Youth Crew supervisor Rebecca West and the Natural Resources’ Youth Crew set up the site and gathered ferns, vine and maple for cooking. Tribal member Shonn Leno and Jeff Kuust, both Natural Resources staffers, kept the grass watered down at the cooking site, and Greg Robinson directed the traditional style of cooking lamprey at the side of a wood fire. He also prepared a seafood soup, heated as soups were heated back in the day, with only hot rocks from the fire.

In addition, Robinson also brought in a Chinook-style wooden bowl that he had carved. Sitting on the table, the bowl held bright red huckleberries and bright blueberries bathed in the evening’s waning light. A series of nesting baskets and standalone baskets woven by community Elder Shirley Norwest and Tribal member Josephine Ingraham added to the traditional look of the dinner.

Public Affairs staffers Kristen Ravia and Janele Gutierrez and Planning and Grants staffer Janell Haller, all Tribal members, prepared fry bread.

The group effort on both sides of the camera and along the sidelines was made possible by Public Affairs Director Siobhan Taylor, who organized, shopped and encouraged everybody involved for days on end. Her son, Joe, a high school student, pitched in on the seafood soup and the shopping, and he kept children on site running around and out of trouble.

Marlene Divina (Chippewa, Cree and Assiniboine) and her husband, Fernando, prepared camas bulbs in a nearly traditional way for the feast.

The bulbs were “wrapped in maple leaves and ferns,” which was the traditional part, but owing to lack of time, they went into the oven overnight to slow cook rather than among heated rocks in the ground for many days.

Corwin would approve that they try to keep within a 200-mile radius for all the products they have on their menu.

Tribal Elder CeCe Kneeland and her daughter, Tribal member Nakoosa Moreland, in traditional dress for an interview with host Corwin, nevertheless pitched in beforehand by gutting the lamprey for cooking. Kneeland also offered a prayer before eating.

Kneeland remembered cleaning lamprey when she was growing up. She remembered how long she used to work at it.

“You would have a lot of lamprey to clean,” she said.

While Tribal members still remember when the lamprey provided so much, those days are all but gone. Still, Corwin and his crew, with their visit to Willamette Falls and Grand Ronde, have added big voices and exceptional talents to those remembering tradition and continuing to honor it.

Photo by Michelle Alaimo